Secondhand Memories
by moonswirl
Summary: Gleekathon, day two hundred and fifty-five: Kurt has one solid memory of his mother that trumps most others.


_Started my daily ficlets to make the hiatus pass, then decided to keep going with a 2nd cycle, and then a 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th cycle. Now cycle 13!_

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**"Secondhand Memories"  
Kurt **

Every time he'd pass that pastry shop, it wasn't so much hunger that grabbed him, it was something else. It was one memory, more powerful than others. It was the one that he had, one of the very few, where in remembering his mother he hadn't been left to resort to other people telling him. No, he remembered walking into that shop, hand in hand with his mother, and looking through the glass case at all that there was.

Now what there was when he walked by the shop one afternoon was a 'for sale' sign in the window. He stopped walking, unable to believe that he was actually seeing this. He felt like someone had just dropped a bucket of ice water down his back. He couldn't move, didn't know what he was supposed to do.

He'd grown up with them… Secondhand memories, that was what he called them. They weren't his, but they'd been given to him… worn, perhaps patchy, fixed up as best they could be and just passed on to him as though they were the genuine article. That was all he could ever expect, he supposed. The ones he had, the ones that were and had always been his, had their own share of holes, but at least they were his. They were that old blanket, worn down from over-use… No one understood why you'd cling to it still because they couldn't grasp the comfort it brought you.

He'd come to resent those other memories sometimes… They didn't feel real, not always. How did he know if it was real? He tried so hard to keep hold on someone that had been gone for so long, he had never gotten to know her, not really, and these memories passed on to him, he somehow had to make sense of them, organize them in some order.

If only he'd known those insignificant days of childhood would have been all he had to cling to, as real one-to-one memories, oh… he would have stored them all up under lock and key. Trips to the park, grocery store runs, haircuts, new foods, nightmares, bedtime stories, stormy night hugs, silly dances… He'd never have let them fade like there'd be hundreds more where those had come from.

But that was the problem though, wasn't it? He could never have known, nor could he have understood, at six years old, that it could all disappear in one instant.

Now, the shop closing down, it was like someone was invading his self made and preserved memories, the most precious ones first… they would go so many times that Kurt knew the people there by name… they knew him, too. He'd remembered how his mother had told him they'd found the place when she was pregnant with him, that she'd been obsessed with the sugary treats all throughout, to the point where she'd call in an order and Burt would stop to pick it up on the way home. She'd tell Kurt that she was certain it was all the desserts that had made him so sweet… he couldn't forget that.

He would still walk by, not even needing to go in, and it would let the memory shine its light on him. What was he supposed to do without it now? This was the place… the building, the old sign, the same window drawings rotating through the year like clockwork… who would ever dream of getting rid of it? Whatever they'd put in there, it would never feel right… It would just try and replace the old shop, but it could never be that… There was only one, and once it was gone…

Later he'd discover the shop was in fact relocating… but even that didn't feel right… like one whole split in half like body and soul. No matter what, it meant an end to something, and he didn't know that he could ever be okay with that completely.

He'd just have to hold on tighter, to what he had… He knew how precious it was, and he'd never let himself think otherwise. As thankful as he was for the secondhand on a day-to-day basis, nothing was like the original.

THE END


End file.
